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Simple Trick To Get Google To Crawl And Index Your Website More Often… Works Every Time!

This is a question I’m asked frequently by business owners and webmasters who are trying to solve the problem of Google only crawling their website once every 7 to 10 days or more. The crawl rate of a website (or the lack thereof) can be especially frustrating to website owners who have made some updates on their website, such as adding some high quality keyword rich content, only to find that after nearly two weeks Google still hasn’t crawled and accounted for those updates.

Let me share with you one simple, yet highly effective way to increase the “crawl rate” of Google on your website. And this is probably going to sound overly simple to some, and for others it may very well be the “ah – haaa” moment you’ve been looking for. But one simple, highly effective, and perfectly legitimate way to increase the crawl rate of your website is to simply add a blog.

That’s right – add a blog to your website!

One of the things that Google loves more than anything is a website that is updated frequently with fresh, relevant, and high quality content. The only way you, as a website owner, can achieve that without going through the arduous task of create multiple static HTML pages all the time is to simply create a blog. Adding a blog is a powerful way to get Google to come back to your website often – really as often as you are creating new blog posts.

Which leads me to my second point about adding a blog to your website. It’s not going to do you any good if you add a blog to your website and don’t update it on a regular basis. So the recommendation to simply add a blog to your website is really only half the battle because once you you have a blog integrated to your website, it’s now time to keep it updated.

How To Effectively Add A Blog To Your Website

So when it comes to physically adding a blog to your website, just know there is a wrong way and a right way to make the addition. You want to add your blog in a way that will actually benefit your entire website, not just your blog. And you do this by making sure you’ve built your blog on a sub-directory of your website and not a sub-domain.

What’s the difference between a sub-directory and a sub-domain?

If you build your blog on a sub directory, then it will look something like this:

http://mywebsite.com/blog

If you build your blog on a sub domain, then it will look something like this:

http://blog.mywebsite.com

Do you see the difference? It’s subtle if you are just looking at it without fully understanding the implications. But from a technical standpoint, and the view point of building authority into the rest of your website, the difference is huge!

My recommendation to clients has always been to build / add a blog to the sub directory of your website, not the sub domain. The reason being, whatever is built on a sub-domain, the entire sub-domain site is seen as a 100% separate site from the original site.

Sub Domain blogs

So if you built http://blog.mywebsite.com, then the blog portion of your website would be viewed as totally separate from your main website. Google would crawl your blog separately from crawling your website. And in Google search results, the authority (Google juice if you will) will be attributed separately than your website.

This is not a good thing!

Remember, the point – at least for this article anyway – of adding a blog to your website is to increase crawl rate and authority of your entire website, not just the blog. In this article, I’m recommending you add a blog for the purpose of it being a contributing factor to increasing the crawl rate and authority of your entire website. When you add a blog to a sub-domain, you’ll be increasing the authority of that blog, but that’s about it. Your main website will be left out of the party – so to speak…

Sub Directory Blogs

Now, when you build your blog on a sub directory – which is what I strongly recommend – we are now talking about setting the stage for your entire website taking on a whole new level of authority in Google search results. Again, a sub-directory blog looks like this: http://mywebsite.com/blog.

The advantage of a sub directory blog, versus a sub domain blog, is that the sub-directory blog IS NOTseen by Google as a totally separate website. The sub-directory blog will be crawled, indexed, and attributed as an extension of the original website. This means, whenever you add a new article to your blog and Google goes ahead and crawls and indexes that article, you are in essence increasing the crawl rate of your website.

Now, if you’ve implemented some changes on other pages within your website like adding fresh, keyword focused content to a particular page and you’ve added a new article to your blog, whenever Google sees that you posted a new article, it will more than likely pick up the other changes you made to your website as well.

Again, if your blog is sitting on a sub-domain like this “blog.mywebsite.com” then the new article is not going to facilitate Google picking up the changes you made to other pages within your website.

So that’s my recommendation of how you can increase the crawl rate of your website – by simply adding a blog and keeping your blog updated with fresh, relevant, high quality content. If you build and integrate your blog into the sub-directory of your website, then you’ll be encouraging Google to crawl and index your website more frequently. On the other hand, if you build your blog on a sub-domain, then you are kind of working against yourself and your goal of increasing the crawl rate of your main website.

What do you think about my recommendation to build a blog in order to increase the crawl rate of your website?

Do you agree that a blog could help you build authority to your overall website?

And would you agree about my idea of building the blog on a sub-directory versus a sub-domain?